Just as Formula 1 drivers were leaning into their holidays, they’ve been called back to the racetrack.

Belgium’s Ardennes forest is as far removed from, say, the sun-soaked seas of Sardinia as you could imagine. Rain is forecast throughout the weekend, and the mercury will be lucky to rise above 22°C.

But if you had to coax a grand prix driver away from a beach holiday, Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps is how you’d do it.

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Ranked comfortably among the sport’s most famous circuits and the top pick among so many drivers, Spa is 7004 metres of driving exhilaration.

And there could be no better setting for the double-header that commences the second half of the season and will set the tone before the true mid-season break starts next month.

PIT TALK PODCAST: Is the Briton in the ascendancy, or can the Aussie make a statement heading into the midseason break? Listen to Pit Talk below.

WHO HAS THE TITLE MOMENTUM?

Formula 1 personnel, as a general rule, are averse to triple-headers. Energy sapping and draining of time at home with loved ones, they’re a necessity to be endured for the sake of logistics rather than anything to be savoured.

But you get the feeling Oscar Piastri might not have minded a race immediately after the Austria-Britain double-header.

The Australian started the twin races with a 22-point buffer over Lando Norris, but successive wins to his teammate — for the first time in the Briton’s career — sliced that down to just eight points at the season’s halfway mark.

Norris was the better driver at the Red Bull Ring, though there was less to pick between them in the race than the build-up to the weekend had suggested.

Piastri had the race won in Silverstone until an unforced error — a contentious safety car infringement — earnt him a penalty that handed Norris a valuable home victory.

That second defeat rankled Piastri, frustrating him in a way nothing else has in Formula 1 — albeit he was far from out of control of his emotions.

But you get the feeling that a chance to respond immediately — to complete the dominant victory Silverstone should have been — would have been welcomed by the Melburnian.

Instead he’s had two weekends off to consider the state of the championship, with his lead delicately poised.

Norris has some momentum at last, though that doesn’t have to be zero sum. Piastri isn’t exactly in the doldrums, as his British Grand Prix performance demonstrated.

But there’s a sense the Englishman is finally over the hill of his struggles with the McLaren car. With half the season to go, we’re back to where so many expected at the beginning of the year this championship would be — with practically nothing separating them.

“I feel like I climbed a little bit back to where I was,” Norris said, per Autosport. “The most positive thing from those two weekends was just that the pace was better from the off and I was more comfortable with the car and in understanding how to get the most pace from it.

“I have more understanding of everything now. But we’re talking minute things, like incredibly small gains here and there.

“I feel more of a threat now.”

The unusual two-weekend break ahead of the true mid-season sojourn means this double-header takes on additional meaning.

Piastri could arrest the slide and head into the break with an extended lead, or Norris could claim back top spot on the final Sunday before the break — and that’s assuming we’re looking at two McLaren one-two finishes.

The form guide swings Piastri’s way. He was by far the better McLaren last year, finishing second to eventual winner Lewis Hamilton, and he was the year before too, when he outqualified his teammate in his rookie year and collected his first sprint podium.

Hungary is then a mixed bag, with Norris easily better in 2023 but Piastri claiming his maiden grand prix victory in one-two formation last year.

But the next two races, not their antecedents, that will set the tone for the championship run-in after the break.

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(Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images)Source: Getty Images

HOW WILL RED BULL RACING’S NEW ERA START?

The mini break was dominated by only one story: Christian Horner’s sacking as team principal and CEO of Red Bull Racing.

The news came as a shock just days after the British Grand Prix, where Max Verstappen had taken a brilliant pole but subsequently failed to convert on a wet Sunday, his extreme set-up gamble for one-lap pace undone by the British weather.

In some respects that weekend summed up where the team had ended up just 18 months after having dominated the sport in 2023: totally reliant on Verstappen, who in turn is powerless to overcome the flaws of his machinery.

That status, combined with myriad other behind-the-scenes issues — not least the Dutchman’s wavering loyalty to the team — had Horner axed after two decades at the helm.

Laurent Mekies, the Racing Bulls team principal, replaced him immediately, and the Frenchman will take his place on the pit wall for the first time this weekend.

The change is more significant than just the name on the boss’s office door.

Mekies is in the same role, but paddock consensus suggests ultimate executive power has been returned to Austria after years of Horner concentrating it in his own hands.

This is now a more corporate Red Bull Racing team — the antithesis of the disrupter squad that made its debut in 2005.

It’s Mekies’s job to make that a success when conventional wisdom suggests deferring to executives removed from the team tends not to work in Formula 1.

The first task of that objective will be to convince Verstappen that he’s the man for the job and that the team’s on the right track.

Fortunately for him, Verstappen could deliver him the ideal start to life at the head of the team.

The Dutchman, who was born in Belgium to his Belgian mother, has always excelled at Spa-Francorchamps.

He won the race three times in succession from 2021, doing so in obliterating fashion from 14th on the grid in 2022 and sixth on the grid in 2023.

He had race-winning pace last year too, having taken pole by a whopping 0.595 in wet conditions, but an engine penalty dumped him to 11th on the grid, from where he finished fourth and just 8.7 seconds off the lead.

Red Bull Racing is expected to bring what is likely to be its last major update to this race in an attempt to broaden the working window of the RB21.

If it works, you wouldn’t put it past him to demonstrate yet again his value to the team — and give Mekies the perfect first weekend on the job.

(Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images)Source: Getty Images

CAN FERRARI SAVE ITS SEASON?

Ferrari’s season is yet to go to plan.

Expectations of a championship challenge unravelled almost immediately in Melbourne, but it was at the next race in China where they were really incinerated in a dramatic double disqualification.

Lewis Hamilton’s sprint victory that weekend was a brief bright spot, but his exclusion from Sunday’s result for plank wear has been more important to everything that’s come since.

This year’s Ferrari car wants to be run very low to the ground, but it hasn’t been able to do so without risking damage to the plank. The team has been able to mask the issue at very slow circuits or tracks with very smooth surfaces, but otherwise it’s been up to the drivers to find ways to find set-up options that allow them to drive around the car’s unpredictable traits.

Charles Leclerc has done a reasonable job, but the problems have hampered Hamilton’s already troubled transition to Ferrari life, though after 12 rounds he’s only 16 points behind his teammate.

In the background the team has been working hard to deliver upgrades that will save the season.

While on one level it looks like throwing good money after bad given next year’s regulation changes, team boss Frédéric Vasseur has suggested it’s important that the team validate its processes now to ensure it’s not led down similar dead-end paths in designing the 2026 car.

The first important upgrade arrived in Austria — a new floor, which worked as expected. Tick.

But the crucial second component comes this weekend in the form of new rear suspension.

New suspension components should help to keep the car stiffer and steadier on the brakes and under acceleration, allowing it to be run lower and therefore closer to its sweet spot.

No-one is expecting Ferrari to instantly become a McLaren rival, but if the suspension works as well as the floor, the Italian team should see a healthy performance boost that will help it retain second in the constructors championship.

Introducing it in Belgium is a risk, with the sprint format reducing practice time to just one hour, but it’s a sign of how important this upgrade is — and perhaps also of the team’s confidence — that it will be bolted onto car this weekend.

“Very, very difficult,” Hamilton said, assessing the team’s task in the single practice session. “We don’t have a lot of time, so you need to double up — you need to make sure you get as much information from both cars. You need to do the whole session. If it’s wet, then that really helps your learning.

“But in terms of finetuning the car, it’s highly unlikely we’re going to fully optimise it during this weekend.

“It’ll probably be something we’re optimising over the next few weekends.”

What happens next will define the second half of Ferrari’s season — and perhaps reframe any optimism for the team in 2026.

(Photo by Dimitar DILKOFF / AFP)Source: AFP

CAN SAINZ FIND CONSISTENCY TO RESCUE FIFTH FOR WILLIAMS?

Williams enjoyed a far better start to the season than the team expected was possible. Not only was it comfortably the best performing and best executing team in the midfield, but there were rounds when it was genuinely racing at the back of the frontrunning pack, often with Ferrari.

It helped the team race to a 31-point lead after the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix — a chasm among the lower scoring midfield outfits, for whom points are rare.

But since then the team has nosedived, scoring just eight more points from the last five weekends. In Austria, two rounds ago, it suffered its worst qualifying result by pure pace.

Meanwhile Sauber has risen thanks to an inspired upgrade brought to Spain. The team has scored 35 points since then, closing the gap to Williams to just 18 points.

Car pace is part of the problem, with Williams undertaking minimal development to focus on next year’s car. Sloppy execution has also been part of the equation.

But Carlos Sainz’s inconsistent form in his first year at Grove has also been a key part of the story.

While Alex Albon is a strong eighth in the drivers championship with 46 points, Sainz is down in 15th and 33 points in arrears.

Plenty has gone wrong for Sainz. He failed to start in Austria thanks to a technical problem, and in Silverstone he was crashed into by an errant Leclerc.

But there’s also no doubt he hasn’t got the most out of the package.

“I think we haven’t delivered everything we can with him this year,” team boss James Vowles said, per Racer. “And it’s been a mixture all across the board.

“There’s been errors that he’s made on track. There’s absolutely been the errors that we’ve made on track. There’s been accidents. There’s been just accumulation of aspects.

“For me it’s about drawing a line in the sand and moving forward from Spa onwards. We have a number of really good races coming up for us. It’s about delivering the result that the car has in it, making sure that we start to really focus in on why we’re not getting everything out of qualifying and dig into that and get the best performance possible.

“For Carlos, it’s achieving the results that I know we are capable of together, which we haven’t done this year.”

Sainz can point to his qualifying pace, which has him on average just 0.07 seconds slower than Albon. But that fine margin has often been the difference between Q1 and Q2 or Q2 and Q3, leaving him several places down on the grid, which in turn has translated to an average difference of 2.7 places between them at the flag.

“That changes your whole weekend because you don’t have a car to actually make it back through the field,” he explained. “In the midfield everyone has the same race pace as you, and it’s extremely difficult to actually recover unless you do something crazy.”

But he admitted the process of changing teams is ongoing at a time it’s never been harder to swap cars in Formula 1.

“Just the car obviously feels very different to a Ferrari — very different limitations, very different driving style required, very different set-up that I need to find to drive the car,” he continued.

“And maybe putting a bit of emphasis on how much lap time and results come from actually understanding yourself with your engineers, with your team, with all the strategy calls — how you communicate during the race, how do you come to the point of making the right call.

“That needs a bit of bedding time to actually execute a good race weekend, both in quali and the race.”

Sainz doesn’t have a lot of work to do to close the gap, but these final hundredths are crucial to eliminate — for himself and the team.